Animal Influence I - Antennae The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture

Lisa Jevbratt
Interspecies Collaboration, 2008 Lisa Jevbratt
Zoomorph started as a “simple” software tool
intended to help my students to understand the
visual sense of various species of animals. It
became an invitation to imagine the world as one
of those animals, and an exploration of our
perception of other animals’ visual perception.
While the initial impulse to make the project was
utilitarian, the complexity and implications of, as
well as problems with, the project soon became
apparent. It asks technical, conceptual,
philosophical and even spiritual questions. I also
sensed an activist potential. On dictionary.com,
“empathy” is defined as “the intellectual
identification with or vicarious experiencing of the
feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of another.” To feel
empathy is to be able to put yourself in someone
else’s position, to walk in their shoes, to see the
world through someone else’s eyes. Zoomorph aims
to create a vicarious experience of the vision of an
animal and, at the very least, encourage an
intellectual identification with that animal in hopes
of making its users acutely aware and respectful of
the ever-presence of a multitude of parallel
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experiences of the world (or Umwelten as described
by Jakob von Uexküll). By imagining what an animal
sees, we recognize that there is someone there that
does the seeing. And maybe that recognition is
enough to make eating him/her, or experimenting
on him/her, much more difficult, if not impossible.
Implementation
How people would access and use the filters was,
from the very beginning, a very important aspect of
the project. Many suggested that I use some kind of
virtual reality display, such as the Allosphere, an
immersive spherical screening room we have at
UCSB, to display animal vision simulations
generated with the filters. But for me it is important
that the project can be a part of people’s own
creative work and their every day life. I did not want
them to go somewhere else, certainly not to a
movie theatre like venue, to experience the
simulations, making them seem like fiction.
The first idea was to create Photoshop filters.
Photoshop will enable large print quality simulations